4 Advent, Year C

"TEAM BUILDING"
A sermon by Fr. Gene Tucker, given at Trinity Church, Mt. Vernon, Illinois, on Sunday, December 20, 2009
Micah 5: 2 – 4, Psalm 80: 1 – 7; Hebrews 10: 5 – 10; Luke 1: 39 – 56

Remember playing a pick-up game of ball with your friends when you were young? It may be that the group was just the neighborhood kids, young and older, siblings, small and great, just anyone who was “around”.

Many times, the group would get together, and someone who suggest playing a game. Then, two people were chosen from the group to be captains of the two teams, and they would stand apart from everyone else, while the choosing up of the two sides would be done by the two captains.

Now, usually, I was near the end of those chosen. And, as things went along, it was sometimes a little embarrassing to be one of the last ones chosen. For, you see, I was B Team material. Or, we might better say I was Z Team material. The truth is that I wasn’t very good at any game involving the handling of a ball. Baseball, softball, stickball, football, I was never very good at any of them, and the other kids knew it. So, usually I was one of the last ones chosen. Sometimes, I was the very last one chosen.

When we human beings build a team, we want all the A Team players. We want the brightest, the best, the most inspired, the most willing, the most energetic.

In the course of life, we’ve figured out that we come out on top a whole lot better with a team made up of people like that, in most cases.

But God doesn’t work that way at all. He seems to be very content to have B Team material. He even likes – and uses – Z Team material, the lowest and least capable of them all.

Our Gospel text for today is a case-in-point, for, at its root, the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to her cousin, Elizabeth, is a scene in which team building is taking place. In this scene, we see the introductions being made, so that the future team of John the Baptist and Jesus can meet again in the waters of the Jordan River, so that the way can be prepared for God’s game plan to save the world in the person and work of Jesus Christ. In this scene are B Team – or maybe Z Team - players, meeting for the first time. In this scene meet the lowest and least capable players of all.

To understand what sort of material God has chosen to work with, we need to back up in the story just a bit, to an earlier part of Luke, chapter one.

It is Luke alone who traces the birth of John the Baptist, and then who traces Jesus’ birth putting parallel aspects of the two birth narratives side-by-side.

In each account, beginning with verse five of chapter one and the birth narrative of John the Baptist, and then skipping ahead to chapter one, verse 26 where Luke traces the birth narrative of Jesus, Luke is recording the story of the birth of two persons whose lives and presence among us would never have happened if human means alone were responsible for their arrival.

This demands an explanation: Zechariah and Elizabeth, John the Baptist’s father and mother, were well along in years, Luke tells us. Put bluntly, they were old. So, it seems that they were beyond the time when a child could be conceived. Furthermore, they’d never been able to have children, and as a result, Elizabeth was called “barren” (one of the worst conditions anyone in biblical times could experience, for barrenness often was thought of as an indication of God’s disfavor). Turning to Mary, we see that she, too, is incapable of bearing a child. We know this from her response to the angel Gabriel, when she says, “How shall this be, since I have no husband?” Mary would have been incapable of conceiving a child.

But, there’s another tie between the two mothers-to-be, and it is the announcement that each will have a child, the announcement being made by the angel Gabriel.

So, now, the team building has begun, and God has announced His choices.

These team members are unlikely players. They are B Team material, perhaps even Z Team material.

They are the more prominent and the absolutely lowest of players….Zechariah was a priest who served in the Temple in Jerusalem, so his family had prominence, and in the human scheme of things, would be qualified for a high place on God’s team. But their inability to have a child would make them B Team material.

By contrast, Mary is far lower in some ways. For one thing, though she is (probably) very young (some scholars think she might have been in her early teens at the time Jesus was born), she is from the “other side of the tracks”, Nazareth, a very small town in the region of Galilee, to the north of the city of Jerusalem. Recall with me the disciple Nathaniel’s reaction when Philip told him that they had “found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph,” Nathaniel’s response simply was “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth in particular, and Galileans in general, were apparently not highly thought of in ancient times. It must have been a backwater sort of a place.

So, here we have the old and the very young, the somewhat prominent and the nobody, the socially acceptable Judeans (Zechariah and Elizabeth) and the unacceptable Galileans. B Team material, maybe less.

But God has a consistent way of choosing the B Team players to do His work.

We see His choices in the people named today.

We see His choices in people like Simon Peter, the blue collar, uneducated fisherman, the man possessed of major faults, like the ability to consistently put his foot in his mouth. So, too, with most of the other disciples who would become the first apostles: most were common folk, most were not products of the best rabbinical schools that Judaism could offer. Most were simple, everyday people who worked with their hands to make a living.

Yet God chose them over the priests, the princes, and the prominent to do His work.

God chooses us to do his work today, calling each of us into His service. At the time of our calling, perhaps most of us were B Team material, spiritually. But God shapes and forms us into A Team players. All we have to do is to do what Mary did, and say, “Let it be to me according to God’s word.”

The contribution that Zechariah, Elizabeth, Joseph and Mary made to God’s game plan is over. Their work has become the stuff of God’s record book, the Bible. They are remembered for their willingness to allow God to shape and use them for His work, His game plan to save the world.

Now, it is our turn. We become players on God’s team through baptism. Then, the training begins, as we are shaped into the members of the team that God needs. And as we carry out God’s plan, our performance is recorded in God’s record book, the Book of Life. Our task as team players is the same as the one that Elizabeth and Mary undertook: to bring the Lord into the world, and to make Him known.

AMEN.